TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2026
Dear Cambridge and Somerville Constituents —
This week, there are three opportunities to learn about and comment on the Draft Updated Combined Sewer Overflow Control Plan.
Combined sewer overflows (CSOs) occur when stormwater and wastewater overwhelm the capacity of combined sewer systems in Cambridge, Somerville, and other local communities, causing the mixture to be dumped into nearby waterways.
Separation of the combined sewer system began about a century ago. Over the past 50 years, Cambridge, for example, has made significant infrastructure investments to separate the stormwater system from the sewer system, and the MWRA and its partner communities, including Cambridge and Somerville, have worked to cut CSO flows to the Charles River by 98% since 1988.
However, large portions of Cambridge and Somerville still have combined sewer systems — and climate change promises to impose even more strain on these systems — as one engineer told me, "At the end of the day, we can only build pipes so big..."
Discharges into our rivers are bad, but without these overflow outlets, overloaded sewer systems could send wastewater backing up into people’s homes during heavy storms. For these reasons, I have been consistently advocating to the MWRA to improve these systems, with upgrades that continue to protect people's homes while working to eliminate toxic discharges in our rivers.
Earlier this month, I was in attendance at the Morse School for a shocking presentation of the Draft Updated Combined Sewer Overflow Control Plan, where MWRA staff indicated that plans to build a 10-million-gallon storage tank under Magazine Beach could result in the permanent loss of our recreational and athletic facilities.
I wrote about this meeting on my State House blog: "This ridiculous proposal to destroy Magazine Beach is dead on arrival." I also submitted this blog post to the MWRA as my initial formal comment. I plan to send an additional formal comment later this week.
Following that meeting, I immediately reached out to the Cambridge City Manager and city staff, to Secretary Tepper and MWRA staff, to DCR, to Senator DiDomenico, and to neighborhood leaders like Steven Miller, Rebecca Bowie, Cambridge City Councilor Cathy Zusy and several others.
Our collective reaction gives me confidence that we are effectively asserting ourselves in this process. The City Manager quickly responded with a letter to the MWRA to make it clear the discussed concept for Magazine Beach is not acceptable. In my conversations with DCR administrators, they also made it clear they would not support this use of Magazine Beach.
I provided an update to the Cambridge City Council on these efforts at their meeting last week, and the council, in turn, voted 9-0 in support of a policy order by Councilor Zusy to call for alternative locations and designs for the storage tank that would avoid permanently closing off our city's second-largest park.
Also last week, I organized a meeting with MWRA staff, City of Cambridge staff, Senator DiDomenico, Magazine Beach Partners, et al. In this meeting, the Senator and I made it clear the plan discussed earlier this month is a non-starter. The MWRA, for its part, appeared to backtrack a bit and seemed to indicate that if a tank were placed under Magazine Beach, it should still be possible to recover the land above it for recreational uses. However, the more I work on this, the more convinced I am that Magazine Beach isn't a viable option for such a massive tank, even if we can ultimately recover the land above it for recreational use.
Yesterday, I had a 45-minute, one-on-one conversation with Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) Secretary Rebecca Tepper. Secretary Tepper also serves as the MWRA Board Chair, and EEA exercises direct oversight over the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) — so she has a crucial role in shaping the future direction of the CSO plan.
I conveyed our community's concerns over this draft plan, and she asked me what I thought we should do. I told her I think we should push to be as protective of our rivers as possible, with continued efforts to reduce and eliminate CSO activations, while also acknowledging the complexity in assessing the best path forward — and, I added, I do NOT think we should put a 10-million-gallon storage tank under Magazine Beach. There's talk of six or more years of construction because the tank would be almost incomprehensibly massive. I reminded her that Cambridgeport is a recognized Environmental Justice community, as are other nearby neighborhoods — and years of park closures are simply not acceptable to our densely populated community where open space is at an absolute premium.
We talked about locating the storage tank in another location — perhaps on land that MIT owns, on surface parking lots at the Kimco site, or even at Goose Park, which is relatively underutilized. We also discussed the draft updated plan alternatives that focus on building a new tunnel to store water, and how a tunnel could have less of a permanent, above-ground footprint with a lot more storage capacity (it would require a much larger overall construction project, however, with considerable blasting, trucking, and various access shafts, etc.).
When this conversation came into focus earlier this month, the thing I found most outrageous was the idea that a 10-million-gallon tank under Magazine Beach could result in the permanent loss of parkland above it — that notion defied our experiences locating tanks at Art Farm in Somerville and in the Port in Cambridge.
At this point, I think the situation and my thinking have evolved a bit — I think we've pushed for more clarity that if a tank is built at Magazine Beach, it could probably be done in a way that allows us to recover the recreational/athletic space for future use. And yet, I am more convinced than ever that this park is simply not a good location for a storage tank — the park is too vital a resource for our community, and so I am calling on the MWRA and the City to work with all concerned to identify alternative locations for enhancing water storage capacity. The state, the city, and the community have all invested too much money and time in enhancing and improving Magazine Beach to turn the central area of the park into an extended construction zone.
As always, I reject false choices. We shouldn't have to choose between having a clean river, a functional sewage system, and our precious parkland. We need better coordination among state agencies and city departments to consider not just how to deal with all the water that climate change is sending our way — but also to proactively look for the best locations to site the necessary infrastructure.
There will be three opportunities this week to learn more and make your voice heard.
This evening, at 6:15 pm, the Cambridgeport Neighborhood Association and Magazine Beach Partners will be hosting the MWRA and City of Cambridge staff for a community meeting at the Morse School to reconsider the presentation made earlier this month. I will be there to offer the latest updates and to listen to resident feedback.
Tomorrow evening, there will be a hybrid public meeting for the MWRA to receive feedback. The meeting will be held in the Somerville City Council chambers at Somerville City Hall from 6 to 8 pm. I am signed up to speak at this meeting. There will be a brief, 10-minute overview of the draft plan — followed by open public comment. You can sign up for that hybrid meeting here: https://cbi-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_T84wgkwMSeiCzLAOBdq16g
Finally, the deadline to submit written comments on the draft updated plan is this Friday at 11:59 pm. Use the information on this page to submit comments: https://us.planengage.com/updatedcsocontrolplan/page/home
The CSO plan is incredibly complicated — it calls on us to make difficult decisions that balance climate change, stormwater and wastewater management, major neighborhood construction impacts, and significant long-term affordability concerns. In this analysis, we must also consider how these systems will perform during future storms, when significant flooding across the city is unfortunately very possible. This raises difficult questions about what we should prioritize. Meanwhile, more suburban communities that are part of the MWRA system are organizing to oppose many of the improvements being discussed, in part because they don't want to help pay for downstream mitigation.
There are no easy answers, and yet, I am fully committed to advocating for the best possible plan. As always, my priority is amplifying constituent concerns and advocating for our community throughout this process. After this week's comment period, the comments will be reviewed by the MWRA, DEP, and the EPA. A final plan will be published next year, and the implementation phase could take decades. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me directly with any questions or concerns.
Yours in service,
Mike
